U.K. waste sustainability; Indian Point data center?; New NRC faces at Palisades; more

The United Kingdom-owned Nuclear Waste Services this week released its sustainability report, which outlines the ways the Kingdom’s nuclear cleanup company aims to minimize waste and harmful emissions from its own operations.

The state-owned corporation said, among other things, that building a U.K. deep geologic repository for radioactive waste “will create transformational opportunities while challenging our ability to achieve Net Zero by 2050 or sooner.” 

Net Zero by 2050 is a U.N. initiative under which countries will attempt to eliminate carbon dioxide emissions by the middle of this century.

Holtec International, Jupiter, Fla., is exploring the idea of putting a data center at the site of the shuttered Indian Point Energy Center in Buchanan, N.Y., the company told a local decommissioning oversight board this month. Holtec is decommissioning the plant.

In a Dec. 5 presentation, Holtec said that while it had no formal plans to develop the site of the three-reactor plant that shut down for good in 2021, the company is exploring whether “sufficient energy [from New York utility Con Edison] would be available to support a potential data center.”

Joseph Mancuso is the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s new senior resident inspector at the Palisades Nuclear Generating Station in Michigan and Takuma Okamoto is the shuttered plant’s new resident inspector, the commission said this week in a press release.

Holtec International, with a $1.5 billion loan from the Department of Energy and $300 million in financial aid from Michigan, plans to restart Palisades by September. The plant shut down in 2022 and Holtec bought Palisades to decommission it. Local, state and later federal leaders eventually coalesced around the idea of firing the plant back up.

The Department of Energy this week said it had $80 million in grant money available to support new technology related to the production of high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU). 

“DOE seeks applications that address technology gaps, enhance current processes to produce HALEU, and advance new technologies that could reduce risk, increase production, or reduce costs. Funding will support demonstration projects at engineering or pilot scale, as well as earlier stage applied research and development projects,” the agency wrote in a press release.

Applications are due by 5:00 p.m. Eastern time on Feb. 26.

The U.S. Trade and Development Agency (USTDA) signed a technical assistance grant with Bulgaria’s state-owned energy company to help the Balkan country deploy small modular reactors, according to a Dec. 13 press release.

The grant was funded through a law Congress passed in 2019.

Obituary

George Farnsworth, a former member of the Illinois low-level radioactive waste task group, died Dec. 9 at his home in Bloomington, Ind. He was 81, according to an obituary posted online.

An engineer, Farnsworth spent most of his career outside of the nuclear realm, working for decades at what is now the Bloomington-based Farnsworth Group, mostly on municipal water treatment issues, the obit said.